People were confused. They had questions. They were skeptical.
Joyce Tang had quit her tech job in the Bay Area and was selling hand-laminated pastries at a local beer garden, including her signature Croissubi, a Spam musubi-inspired croissant sprinkled with melted parmesan and togarashi.
“People saw the word ‘Spam,’ and they told me, ‘Ooh, yuck. That’s weird,’” she told host Jessie Sheehan this week on She’s My Cherry Pie. “And I had to explain myself more times than I liked.” But Joyce was onto something, and after years of doing food competitions, pop-ups, and wildly popular pandemic pastry boxes, she opened her brick-and-mortar bakery in Oakland in 2021: Bake Sum, which now has two locations.
Then, in 2024, the New York Times named her Croissubi one of the best dishes of the year. Suddenly, customers lined up for it, no questions asked. Others were in line for her rotating flavors of mochi bites (Thai tea! Ube!), swirling, cloud-like milk buns, okonomiyaki danishes, and cookie boxes (think black sesame snickerdoodle), from a continually changing menu.
Lucky us, she captured all her creative bakes in Bake Sum: Asian American Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats, which comes out Sept. 1st. The flavors are inspired and exciting, and whether you’re a novice or pro-baker, the book will meet you where you’re at.
This week on the pod, Joyce walks Jessie through her pivot from tech world to butter world, the delicacy of dragon beard candy, and her recipe for her most popular flavor of mochi bites: brown butter. Snag the recipe right this way.
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To get a crisp exterior on the mochi bites, a heavy-gauge steel mini muffin pan is the secret (aluminum cooks things quickly so they’ll be done before they’re brown enough)
A mochi must: Mochiko flour! (This is glutinous rice flour, which is not the same as regular rice flour)
Joyce likes to top the mochi bites with puffed buckwheat groats for texture (also good on yogurt)
”It was promising, but it wasn’t pretty.”
–Joyce Tang on her early baking days
Tip of the week
Color = flavor. Home bakers tend to err on the side of playing it safe, but if you want that brown butter to bring its butterscotch magic, you need to take it further than pale golden. Keep bubbling until it’s a cognac leather brown, with black flecks of milk solids.
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